One of those Moods…

Last weekend was weird. Seriously weird. Not through any particular event but just from how it felt upstairs in the brain department. Even walking home from work on Friday night I could feel myself slipping into what I refer to as “one of those moods…” It’s hard to explain what one of these moods is like. It’s a bizarre and surreal no-man’s-land between anger and depression. It wells up from deep inside and just takes over. It feels like flying and falling at the same time. It swings pendulum like from one extreme to the other. On Saturday afternoon I was on the back-swing from misery when I started to get angry, really angry. When anger rears its vitriolic head I tend to get very vocal; I tend to get very… political. My friends love it when I’m like this, they derive immense amusement from my directionless, shouty rants against the injustices of the world.

This is exactly what happened this Saturday. With all the feckless stumbling and hypocritical posturing in the modern political world there is no shortage of things to be angry about. So I opened up a big fat can of righteous indignation and went to war on my keyboard.

RAWR!

What I produced was a little weird. For a start I seem to have written it in the second person. Other than that it’s not particularly special. It’s just very angry and very sweary, sprinkled with the odd interesting phase or two. I will admit that it’s violently left-wing and very much in the vein of “our generation got screwed” with an undertone of the terror of existence in a godless world. This being a result of my own political leanings. I think it’s topical, you might think it’s a steaming bowl of shit. Either way I give you the angriest 900 words I’ve ever written. I give you the oddly titled Cosmic Think in the Brain Sack – Elegy:

The sky is black. Like really black. Like a big pool of blackness filled with… you know, black. It’s pretty fucking black. Then you remember that you’ve got you eyes closed. You open them. It’s still as black as all manner of hells but the sky is studded with tiny pin pricks of white.

Stars….

Sprawled on your back on a bed of coarse sand you survey the whole majesty of the heavens. It’s fucking terrifying. Millions upon millions of astronomically huge spheres burning gas in a way where it isn’t actually burnt. So far away that you’re looking through windows in time. That star, the faint bluish one, with the slight twinkle? That star probably exploded a million years ago. But you can still see it, even though it’s not there any more. It’s fucking witchcraft that’s what it is. Like talking to a man on the bus but knowing he’s actually just a rotting corpse. That sort of shit freaks you out. It’s all just too fucking big, too incomprehensible. It’s enough to drive you mad with terror. Gasps of fear catch in your dry throat as your eyes start to glaze with tears of panic. It all makes you feel so fucking lonely, so fucking vulnerable. The massive, endless, yawning hunger of entropy and infinity, the knowledge that you are insignificant and pointless. It forces your thoughts inwards, into yourself. The horrific contemplation of causality drives you away from it, as far as it can drive you away it drives you thoughts to the here and now, to thoughts about you and your life.

That’s just as fucking bad. Maybe even worse…

You were put together from a box of dodgy spare parts by a blind and feckless creator out of his brain on special brew and spite. You’re wired up all wrong and don’t work like you should. Society shuns you and laughs at you. You’ve fucked up every chance life gave you. Your every waking moment is filled with the horrified echoes of what-ifs and might-have-beens. You thoughts fold outwards like writhing mind-tentacles, the clutch at civilisation and society.

That’s fucking awful too…

You know that society is based on three things: an elaborate lie, something that’s running out and one sole, inalienable truth. The elaborate lie is economics: an overly complex financial construct that is so confusing it may as well just be fucking magic. All the common man knows is that his hard-earned cash is worth less today than it was yesterday. While rotund men in bowler hats earn money by quaffing champagne, by snorting caviar off the porcelain breasts of expensive prostitutes, all the way furiously masturbating over the crushed dreams of the poor.

You remember that you’re poor. It makes you angry…

The thing which is running out is oil. We built an entire fucking civilisation on a finite commodity which we set fucking fire to. How the sweating fuck does that make any damn sense? And now it’s running out. But instead of trying to replace it we’re just ramping up the price and fighting over what’s left because that is just how humanity fucking rolls.

And that leads onto the truth…

The one, inalienable truth of society is that people are bastards. Proper, copper-bottomed, back-stabbing, two-faced, shit-slinging bastards. Why help your fellow man? Why work together to reach the stars when you can kill him and clamber to the top over a heap of bloated corpses? Give a man a fish and he’ll weaponise it and use it to kill his fucking neighbour.

Then the sharp knife point of the truth…

You know all of this but you’re not going to do a damn thing about it to fix it. Because your broken and fucked and cast out onto the shit-heap of society. You’re no fucking use to anyone. Not you, not your friends. Not a single one of your entire damn generation. Because you’re all worn down and ground into the shit by the bastards who came before you. They didn’t use the bodies of their contemporaries to climb to the top. They climbed to the top using the bodies of a generation yet to be born. You and everyone else was cheated out of your future because some rich bastard wanted to pay less tax, earn more money and hold onto a dead dream for as long as possible regardless of the consequences. They wanted to gild their own little world. We just didn’t fucking matter to them. So we came into the world already fucked over, already broken, already washed out and defeated. You’ve failed at life because you were never going to be allowed to succeed. The only way that the fuck-ups can avoid responsibility for their failures is to make sure that those who come after them don’t get a chance to do anything about it. Filled with anger and hate your thoughts uncoil, heading back out to the stars.

You realise something…

At the end of the day it’s all pretty fucking irrelevant. We’re just a speck of cosmic shit floating in a pissy sea of space fire and celestial nothingness. And it’s mostly just nothingness. It’s eternal and beyond us.

No matter how hard they try, no one’s going to be able to fuck that up…

4 responses to “One of those Moods…”

That was really quite angry, but every single word of it was the truth.

I really liked the first couple of paragraphs, a little bit Lovecraftian in then horror of things that are too big to understand. It actually mirrors a little bit the idea I’ve got rattling around for this months Pictonauts.